Ants turn unwelcome lodgers into a useful standing army

Mercenary soldiers are notoriously unreliable because their loyalty is as thin as the banknotes they get paid, and they may turn against their employers before moving on to the next dirty job. Not so in fungus-farming ants, ...

Parasitized bees are self-medicating in the wild, study finds

Bumblebees infected with a common intestinal parasite are drawn to flowers whose nectar and pollen have a medicinal effect, a Dartmouth-led study shows. The findings suggest that plant chemistry could help combat the decline ...

Orphan army ants join nearby colonies

(PhysOrg.com) -- Colonies of army ants, whose long columns and marauding habits are the stuff of natural-history legend, are usually antagonistic to each other, attacking soldiers from rival colonies in border disputes that ...

Manganese speeds up honey bees

Asked to name one way people have changed the environment, many people would probably say "global warming." But that's really just the start of it.

Newly discovered wasp turns social spiders into zombies

It sounds like the plot of the world's tiniest horror movie: deep in the Ecuadorian Amazon, a newly discovered species of wasp transforms a "social" spider into a zombie-like drone that abandons its colony to do the wasp's ...

Ant colonies behave like neural networks when making decisions

Temperatures are rising, and one colony of ants will soon have to make a collective decision. Each ant feels the rising heat beneath its feet but carries along as usual until, suddenly, the ants reverse course. The whole ...

How single-celled organisms navigate to oxygen

A team of researchers has discovered that tiny clusters of single-celled organisms that inhabit the world's oceans and lakes, are capable of navigating their way to oxygen. Writing in e-Life scientists at the University ...

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